It was an identical assignment I had for Reading Popular Culture class (same professor), the difference is that the film class understood the assignment completely. The pop culture class bumbled and stumbled and fumbled around in the dark looking for comprehension of that vastly complicated instruction for the assignment. Write an analysis paper on a text. Then write a critical response to your own work.
Common sense ain't often common, and for some folks, simple directions ain't so easy to understand.
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(Essay: 2nd/Response 1st draft)
ENG 317
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response 2: Miller's Crossing
Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat
Nothing more foolish than a man chasin' his hat.
―Tom Reagan
―Tom Reagan
Almost an hour into Miller's Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990) we encounter the only scene in the film where a hat of some kind is not visibly represented. Yet even in being physically absent within the frame of what is seen, hats—or at least one hat—still play(s) a crucial, an integral, part of what takes place between Tom Reagan and Verna Bernbaum (Gabriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Hardin) at this point.
The scene opens in Tom's apartment. Wearing suspenders over his undershirt, Tom sits hunched forward on the edge of his bed smoking a cigarette. A (presumably empty) flask of whiskey sits on a small stand nearby. Through stain-yellowed lace curtains the sky outside lightens with dawn. The telephone rings and Tom answers it as though he's been waiting for it to ring. His side of the conversation is sparse and seemingly uninformative: "Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Where? Okay." He hangs up the phone and pulls the chain to turn on the bedside lamp next to the telephone. Verna stirs in the bed, asking if he's been up all night and what he's chewing over. Tom replies with a comment about a dream he had once. A dream about his hat.
Tom describes his dream to Verna; it's a scene we've already witnessed. In the opening credits of the film the camera looks up towards the sky through the limbs of a forest of pine trees. Without context as to where this forest is or why there is a sudden—seemingly disconnected—shift from urban gangster film and this rural forest, we move as if walking slowly through the trees. Then, cutting to a view from ground-level, a hat falls to the leaf-covered path. The hat is picked up by the wind and swept further along the path away from us, disappearing from view as the opening credits fade out. Only later do we learn that this forest path is the eponymous Miller's Crossing, a remote place where the criminal henchlings take people to be killed.
Verna's response to hearing Tom's dream is somewhat Freudian in nature, in that she assumes a conclusion that is based on stereotypical ideas of what happens in dreams and that symbolism holds sway no matter what the context. When she hears Tom tell her that, in his dream, his hat blew off his head while he was walking in the woods, she interrupts saying, "And you chased it, right? You ran and ran and you finally caught up to it and picked it up but it wasn't a hat anymore. It had changed into somethin' else—somethin' wonderful."
Tom berates Verna's interpretation, almost as if scolding her for her fanciful ideas, "No, it stayed a hat..." He gets up abruptly and starts getting dressed. His demeanor has quickly shifted —as if at the drop of a hat—from quiet rumination to aggravation. We can deduce that the phone call was asking him to meet someone and now he must go throw his hat into the ring. But in this narrative of gambling against double-double-crosses, Tom Reagan plays all angles. He collects as many secrets as he can (keeping them under his hat) and tells others, like Verna, only as much as they need to know; only sharing enough necessary details to get the information he needs. And in this conversation with Verna, Tom continues his habit of talking through his hat.
He asks her where her brother Bernie is—the double-dealing source of the current downward spiral of trouble between crime bosses in this corrupt town—telling her that since Bernie isn't protected anymore, Tom should warn Bernie to split town. Of course, the reason Bernie isn't protected anymore is because of Verna and Tom betraying Leo with their volatile hidden affair.
The banter between Tom and Verna is filled with sharped quips and untold history. Just the sort of hard-boiled dialogue that distinctly marks the noir genre of gangster films Miller's Crossing mimics, draws itself from, and, in many ways, satirizes and contradicts. This scene can be held as a microcosm of the entire film—of the entire genre in its way—filled with variations on the traits and clichés of film noir. The dingy apartment of a down-on-his-luck boozing gambler who's having an affair with his boss's vampy girlfriend; the constant swirl of cigarette smoke; the barbed witty comments between characters; ambiguous motives that form only certain pieces of the puzzle the viewer is invited to figure out but will never fully understand because of the gaps between the information given and the information withheld. And, of course, the hats.
When watching the archetypical film noir movie, a single line of summary could suffice for the entire genre: "I think the man in the hat did something terrible" (The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasden, 1983). Taking that as being true (at least for Miller's Crossing), it becomes ultimately significant that this scene in the middle of the film is glaring empty of any visual hats is itself centered on the talk of a dream in which a hat is lost. The connection between the opening credits (which evidently portray Tom's dream of his hat blowing away in the woods—down a path he will later walk on two separate occasions—once to kill a man ad then again when he is almost certainly going to be killed; both times the expected murder is avoided by a double-cross) and this scene must not be forgotten, bridged, in a way, by the scene following the opening credits, in which Tom awakens from a drunken stupor with his hat missing.
At the close of this scene, Tom—who is already plotting how to play the next series of angles he's been given via the information Verna gives him about Bernie—stares coldly at Verna as she voices a statement that displays the ethically ambiguous nature that pervades Miller's Crossing, "The two of us, we're just about bad enough to deserve each other." As if rationalizing the nature of his own actions—holding himself to a set of moral ideals reserved exclusively for himself—Tom replies with the opened ended question, "Are we…?" Of course, Verna thinks so and answers the question accordingly. But Tom disagrees, and his almost-righteous certainty leads us as witnesses to this tragicomedy of betrayal to remain unsure of what moral and ethical principals are at work here, and, perhaps, where his hat is.
Response
As in almost any gangster or film noir movie, hats play a significant role in setting the tone, creating atmosphere, and casting a particular style to the visual narrative. In the Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing (1990) this tone atmosphere and style involving hats is taken to the extreme.
The scenes discussed in "Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat" (Barrett, 2009) exemplify how even in missing from visual context, the hat is an integral part of the story being told. This then unequivocally demonstrates the symbology involved in what a hat can represent, as well as the importance of meaning placed upon its presence, even if that is a presence via absentia.
When Verna asks Tom what he's chewing over, he tells her he's thinking about a dream he had once. This comment, follow one about having been up all night, inherently implies that the dream he relates to her was one that happened some time ago. It's still in his head some days, if not weeks, later. Powerful imagery to linger in his conscious mind for so long. Taking visual cues from the story, the dream he describes is a scene we witnessed with the opening credits of the film, and subliminally connects us to the importance not only of hats in general, but more specifically, each individual man's hat as being something crucial of himself.
This idea plays out several times in the film. When Tom visits the boxer Drop Johnson, he finds a hat on a table that is far too small to fit Drop, thus the hat left behind becomes more than a hat on a table, it becomes crucial evidence of a double cross in the works. By Tom discovering it, the hat, being citing as too small for Drop, also comes to represent the emasculation of the hat's owner—most likely Bernie Bernbaum. Later, when Bernie himself shows up for the second time at Tom's apartment, his mere presence being a threat to Tom, hats come to represent power and protection. While Bernie is seated in the apartment, his hat rests on his knee as if it were some sort of shield or royal crest. Tom sits across from him in his long underwear and suspenders, almost naked in his hatless state. When Bernie leaves, Tom—only one of two instances in the film where he's been caught off-guard or is defenseless—leaps into action, grabbing—not his shoes and coat, but his pistol and his hat. He short-cuts his way downstairs trying to get the drop on Bernie, but trips and falls to the floor, losing his firearm and hat in the process. Walking past a prostrate and hatlessly naked Tom, Bernie has all the power in this scene.
Towards the end of the film, when secrets are slipping out from the hats they've been tucked under, Verna meets with Tom strolling along a sidewalk in the rain. She asks him what he's doing. "Walking…" he replies curtly. "Don't let on more than you have to," Verna says, obviously frustrated. Tom deigns to elucidate this one time. "…In the rain." When they pause a moment, the rain pelts his hat, rivulets running off as if it can wash clean the secrets and blood causes by the numerous betrayals, lies, and double-crosses we've witnessed in this film. But of course, there is no absolution for this is gangster film noir, and in this scene Tom's hat merely serves to keep the rain off.
As in almost any gangster or film noir movie, hats play a significant role in setting the tone, creating atmosphere, and casting a particular style to the visual narrative. In the Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing (1990) this tone atmosphere and style involving hats is taken to the extreme.
The scenes discussed in "Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat" (Barrett, 2009) exemplify how even in missing from visual context, the hat is an integral part of the story being told. This then unequivocally demonstrates the symbology involved in what a hat can represent, as well as the importance of meaning placed upon its presence, even if that is a presence via absentia.
When Verna asks Tom what he's chewing over, he tells her he's thinking about a dream he had once. This comment, follow one about having been up all night, inherently implies that the dream he relates to her was one that happened some time ago. It's still in his head some days, if not weeks, later. Powerful imagery to linger in his conscious mind for so long. Taking visual cues from the story, the dream he describes is a scene we witnessed with the opening credits of the film, and subliminally connects us to the importance not only of hats in general, but more specifically, each individual man's hat as being something crucial of himself.
This idea plays out several times in the film. When Tom visits the boxer Drop Johnson, he finds a hat on a table that is far too small to fit Drop, thus the hat left behind becomes more than a hat on a table, it becomes crucial evidence of a double cross in the works. By Tom discovering it, the hat, being citing as too small for Drop, also comes to represent the emasculation of the hat's owner—most likely Bernie Bernbaum. Later, when Bernie himself shows up for the second time at Tom's apartment, his mere presence being a threat to Tom, hats come to represent power and protection. While Bernie is seated in the apartment, his hat rests on his knee as if it were some sort of shield or royal crest. Tom sits across from him in his long underwear and suspenders, almost naked in his hatless state. When Bernie leaves, Tom—only one of two instances in the film where he's been caught off-guard or is defenseless—leaps into action, grabbing—not his shoes and coat, but his pistol and his hat. He short-cuts his way downstairs trying to get the drop on Bernie, but trips and falls to the floor, losing his firearm and hat in the process. Walking past a prostrate and hatlessly naked Tom, Bernie has all the power in this scene.
Towards the end of the film, when secrets are slipping out from the hats they've been tucked under, Verna meets with Tom strolling along a sidewalk in the rain. She asks him what he's doing. "Walking…" he replies curtly. "Don't let on more than you have to," Verna says, obviously frustrated. Tom deigns to elucidate this one time. "…In the rain." When they pause a moment, the rain pelts his hat, rivulets running off as if it can wash clean the secrets and blood causes by the numerous betrayals, lies, and double-crosses we've witnessed in this film. But of course, there is no absolution for this is gangster film noir, and in this scene Tom's hat merely serves to keep the rain off.
Works Cited
Ayto, John, comp.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
17th ed. London: Collins Reference, 2006. Print.
Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen."Miller's Crossing Screenplay."
Screenplays For You.
Kinozol. Web. 2 Nov. 2009..
Kinozol. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.
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